Lightroom slow?

[Woody Campbell]

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I've encountered serious speed issues running LR. Here's a post I put up on the Adobe LR forum. Any suggestions or different experiences?

 

Here is my configuration: a new mac dual quad core with standard video card and 8 mgs of memory. 4 internal ata drives 750megs each, 7200 rpm. My photos are on 6 external firewire drives of various sizes and manufacturers, divided chronologically. I've got SATA drives on order to replace them. I have a redundant set of drives as backups - only the current year is mounted.

 

I have about 50,000 images all together. I've indexed about 6,000 of them - various folders on all six drives. I plan on indexing all of them.

 

I put together a collection of about 300 images (drawn from various drives) to review with a client later this week.

 

The problem: scrolling in the grid view in the collection (or actually anywhere) is painfully slow. It more like lurching. Hit page down and up comes the dreaded spinning lollypop. For 30 seconds or so. The thumbnails are all course resolution. It takes minutes for them to come into focus. when you page down same thing again. If you page back up you're back to lowest rez thumbnails on the ones you just waited for - the higher rez versions don't seem to buffer. Thiis happens whatever thumbnail size I use.

 

Switch to the develop view: a long, long wait with the menus blacked out and the lollypop. Again, 30 seconds or so. Right arrow to the next frame - same long wait.

 

. . . .

 

I may be doing something wrong, but it's not clear in the documentation what it is.

 

 

Thanks.

 

Woody

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[Shootist]

You do mean GB's when you typed "megs". correct? I would hope so.

 

Have you checked the cache settings in LR and increased it? Have you moved the cache to the beginning of a drive, in it's own partition, that does not contain the OS or the actual images? Preferably on a drive that is not used for anything other then storing files that are not used at all when you are editing photos and all those other files are in another partition on the physical drive. I actually have one partition at the beginning of a secondary drive that houses all the cache and temp files for all my editing programs. PS, Bridge, ACR, Nikon Capture 4.x & NX and LR. This seems to speed thing up although I have found LR to be fairly slow when browsing a library with a large number of images in it. That is one reason I don't use LR.

 

Have you created a separate library for those images you plan on showing a client. This would be best so you don't have to load your complete library just to view those certain images.

[Woody Campbell]

You do mean GB's when you typed "megs". correct? I would hope so.

 

. . . That is one reason I don't use LR.

 

.

 

Yes - it's GB. Thanks.

 

What do you use for indexing, etc.?

 

Do Aperture users have a different experience?

[arthury]

Y

[...]

What do you use for indexing, etc.?

[...]

 

What do you mean?

Do you mean if we place our indexes on a separate drive?

[Eoin]

Woddy, Sorry I can't offer advice, but to say I've heard that LR does indeed get very slow the larger the number of images. I'd suspect a lot of the slowness could be due to the firewire bus speed, you don't say if it's firewire 400 or 800, if 400 than effective read/write speed would not be significantly faster than say USB.

 

Is there any reason why with 4 x 750GB (3TB) drives you chose to stick with keeping your images on external enclosures with the limiting firewire pipe as opposed to keeping the images local on the faster SATA bus and just use the externals as backup?. This will have a huge impact on read/write speeds.

 

With regard to Aperture, I can only pass comment on images within the library as opposed to referenced images. On the Internal Library best performance is achieved with not having any more than 10,000 images in a single project and you are not limited by the amount of projects you can have in a single library. However there are also reports of slowdowns in Aperture also when reaching the 50,000 - 100,000 range. I have about 60,000 in a single library on my G5 with very reasonable performance.

 

If at all possible move from firewire to SATA for performance gains and I don't know how you can do that within the LR an easy way. Perhaps some of the LR users can advise the best course of action to take, Sorry:(

[Woody Campbell]

. . .

Is there any reason why with 4 x 750GB (3TB) drives you chose to stick with keeping your images on external enclosures with the limiting firewire pipe as opposed to keeping the images local on the faster SATA bus and just use the externals as backup?. This will have a huge impact on read/write speeds.

 

. . . .

 

 

Thanks. I'm using the internal drives as follows: one is a boot drive - putting extensive image files on it may slow down the system in other respects. I've designated one drive as a dedicated scratch disk to speed up PS (which so configured runs very, very crisply on this machine).

 

That leaves 1.5 TB for files on internal drives - which should accomadate a couple of years. One of the issues is that I continue to use C1, whcih generates full rez previews which double the disk space requirements.

 

My legacy drives are a combination of firewire 400 and 800. This is probably a serious bottleneck.

 

I'm actually stopping in my tracks to sort this out before I spend more resources on indexing in LR (or at least install the SATA drives to see if there is an improvement) Somehow I'm going to get indexed and integrated but LR may or may not be the software.

 

It strikes me as odd that Michael Reichmann's and Jeff Schewe's video doesn't make any referrence to this problem (nor does the DOP book) - Jeff says that he has 30k or so photos indexed. The performance issue is at least as serious as the magenta cast was for the M8.

 

Wait to see what C1 comes up with in their overdue upgrade?

[techpan]

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There is always a limitation to what the performance will allow. Even with your setup which is pretty high end you're going to see performace issues with what you are doing. I would dump all the pics on one drive and do the presentation of the single drive. I myself am running a laptop right now with dual core 2.33 with 4 MB cach with a 200 GB 7200 sata drive and 4 GB of memory and lightroom slows down when you load a lot of pictures at once.

[xrogers]

I use Lightroom on a much older, slower Mac than yours (dual 2Ghz G5, 3.5Gb memory), and don't have these problems.

 

My main library (nearly 30,000 photos) is on my boot disk (it takes about 400Mb), with its original photos (300Gb or so) on a second internal SATA disk. Performance is perfectly acceptable---in fact, I'd call it good. I only use external disks for backup. Lightrooom bangs on its library and cache all the time, they must be on a disk that can be accessed quickly (I'd want at least FW800). Your performace sounds so bad that I expect there's more to it than the disks, however.

 

Initially I found Lightroom's performance completely unacceptable, but things improved vastly when I had the program render previews on import (check the box that says something like "render standard sized previews" when you import). Otherwise Lightroom builds its previews as you need them (so on a grid page, it may need to render 40 or 50 jpgs before it can display the page, very slow!). I think you can do this after the fact (I haven't done it because I did it on import) by selecting all your photos, and choosing menu "Library/Previews/Render Standard Sized Previews". Expect it to take a while...

 

You could choose 1:1 previews if you have the space (they are bigger) to speed up zooming performance if that seems unacceptable as well. I'm satisfied with standard previews, so have not tried 1:1.

 

Also, if you have the program push metadata out to DNGs on the fly, that may slow things down. Keep metadata in the database, and if you want it in the DNG, push it out periodically (I don't recall how this is done). You'll find some control over this stuff in "File/Catalog settings", and choose the "Metadata" tab. Make sure "Automatically write changes into XMP" is *not* checked. Under the "General" tab is a button to optimize your database as well---that may be worth a try.

 

Be certain to back up before messing with this stuff!

 

Good luck,

 

Clyde

[mwalker649]

Make sure under "File"> "catalog settings" > "metadata" tab that the "automatically write changes into XMP" Is checked OFF.

When its on it will make the program run slower.

[Eoin]

Woddy,

 

I'm surprised by your answer, but then everyone has their own way of doing things. If it were me I'd have kept the 750GB for Base OS & applications, a raptor or your 2nd 750GB as scratch and 2 x 750GB as image / image software disks. and just used externals for backup & off line storage . I fully understand the hog on HDD space C1 imposes with it's rather large previews, but I'd be running C1 as fine proof only for specials where LR does not preform.

 

Each to their own and what works for me may not work for you. I hope someone can help you out with the indexing issue but while your using FW 400/800 to call your whole library up your bogging down under the weight of so many images through such a slow bus. Consider in the short term exporting the 300 client shots to your internal HDD and create a local library for these.

 

Or on the other hand you could throw caution to the wind and move your entire library and photos to the internal HDD and repoint to your masters.

 

Adobe Lightroom - Moving your Lightroom Library to an external hard disk drive is an example going from internal to external storage but should be the same in the reverse. Sorry if you know about this already but it's just a thought seeing as you are going to have to move everything anyway with your new SATA's on the way.

[Jager]

I'm using the internal drives as follows: one is a boot drive - putting extensive image files on it may slow down the system in other respects.

 

Woody, just to point out that slowing down your system because of stuff on the boot drive would only be a factor if/when your system began swapping - which ain't likely to happen with 8GB of system memory!

 

As has been mentioned, I'd definitely move your main working folders to one of your internal drives. Archive off to your external drives as needed.

 

BTW, that's a fabulous computing setup you've got there!

 

Jeff

[Guest guy_mancuso]

I use my boot drive becuase it is 2 Western Digital Raptors at 10k running Raid 0 , so nothing faster than that but normally you should be off the boot drive but using a internal drive and that is where you should point the library too.

[arthury]

What do you mean?

Do you mean if we place our indexes on a separate drive?

 

Any response to this ?

[ericperlberg]

Woody, I have a set up v. similar to yours. I use drive 1 (raptor 10k) for my system and apps, drive 2 (raptor 10k) for a scratch. Like Eoin suggests, I use drive 3 for saving my images to and drive 4 is an auto backup of drive 3 (not raid just superduper programmed backup). When drive 3 is full, I archive it (label it and make a 2nd archive copy) install a new sata in drive 3, clear drive 4 and start again. Your internal sata drives are way faster than firewire 400 externals and still significantly faster than fw 800 (by a factor of 4x). The other thing that pops in my mind is to make sure that you don't have the "whenever possible put hard drives to sleep" tick box ticked in the Energy Saving System Pref.

 

The latency of using external drives (spin up if that's happening) and then bandwidth for moving data are most likely causing slow downs. Add to that your library size and you could be causing yourself unnecessary complications.

 

I don't know if this article is of any use (I generally find O'reilly.net articles well thought through). This article maintains 10,000 images in one catalog before performance issues. Perhaps you prefer all your images in one catalog but apparently starting a new catalog will (should) speed things up.

[Woody Campbell]

I spent a fair amount of time in the last few days configuring LR. Here are my findings:

 

If you have a desktop tower system (like my mac dual quad) dedicate an internal 7200 rpm hard drive to LR.

 

1. Just as everyone says, turn off "Automatically write changes into XMP".

 

2. Move the catalogue files to the dedicated drive. Without previews the catalogue was about 1.4g for the 6000 files that I've put on my system so far.

 

3. Select the option in the options menu to keep 1:1 previews forever. Select all of the images. Under the Library menu select the option to generate 1:1 previews. This took less than an hour. The prieviews are stored with the index files on the fast, dedicated disk. They increased the library size to 13.2g. This sped things up very dramatically. Loupe view and zooms are instantaneous. There is no more than a second's wait for the menus to become available in the develop view. In the grid view scrolling and resizing thumbnails are instantaneous. Minor wait (a couple of seconds max) for images in the grid view to reach the correct rez - presumably as LR downrezes the 1:1s to fit the view.

 

4. Again select all of the images, and select the option under the library menu to generate standard sized previews (I selected the largest standard size in options-but I don't know if this is optimum). LR creates these in addition to the 1:1s. The new catalogue size is up to 16g or so. Now the images come up in the correct resolution in the grid view almost instantaneously.

 

So . . . with these four tweaks LR has gone from being a sluggish dog to a speed demon. I'm delighted. It's actually very, very fast. Saving the previews takes substantial hard drive space, but that's ok because you've dedicated a drive anyway. If the catalogue size scales in a linear fashon my 60 thousand files should require 150 of catalogue space which is no big deal on a 750g drive.

 

This configuration obviously will not work on laptops and other single drive computers like the iMac. I'll copy o bunch of files onto an iMac this weekend to see what the best tweaks are for it now that I understand what the independent variables are.

 

BTW - thanks to those of you who replied to my initial post - you were very helpful and led me to the solution